Tool
Meta and OpenGraph tag generator
Build a complete head block and see how the title and description will be truncated in results.
Head tags written by hand drift. One page ends up with no description, another keeps a canonical copied from the page it was cloned off, and neither problem is visible until you look at what actually got indexed.
Fill this in and it writes the whole block — title, description, canonical, robots, OpenGraph and Twitter — with the character counts that decide whether your title survives to the results page.
The preview shows the truncation, which is the part people underestimate. A 90 character title is not a longer title, it is a title with the end cut off.
- Title length
- 1860 or under shows in full
- Description length
- 0120 to 160 is the useful range
example.com
meta-tag-generator
<title>meta-tag-generator</title>
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large">
<meta property="og:title" content="meta-tag-generator">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="meta-tag-generator">Notes
Under 60 characters for a title. Padding the middle with a category name, as this site used to do, buys nothing and costs you the end of the sentence.
Between 120 and 160 for a description. Shorter and the engine pads it with text you did not choose.
The canonical should be the clean URL of the page itself, not the URL you happen to be on. Tracking parameters otherwise fragment one page into many indexed copies.
noindex with follow, not nofollow, on a thin page. The page stays out of results while its links are still crawled.